Adam Makos Books in Order

If you want the signature air-war story: A Higher Call → Devotion
If you prefer tank warfare and ground combat: Spearhead
If you like oral history and many viewpoints: Voices of the Pacific
If you want to read in publication order: A Higher Call → Voices of the Pacific → Devotion → Spearhead

Adam Makos writes military history with his eye on the people inside the uniform. He is from the Williamsport area of Pennsylvania and grew up nearby in Montoursville, in the mountains of northern Pennsylvania. Much of his early interest came from family, especially his grandfathers, Francis Panfili and Mike Makos, both World War II veterans who took him to airshows and museums and helped fill childhood with model planes and tanks.

Those stories turned history into something personal.

As a middle schooler, he, his younger brother Bryan, and their friend Joe Gohrs decided on a rainy summer day to make a homemade newsletter about the planes and pilots they loved reading about. The name, Ghost Wings Club newsletter, makes him laugh now, but the project kept growing. Before long it had turned into Valor, a history magazine focused on veterans and their memories.

That work taught him how to listen. It also sent him far from home. Over the years Makos interviewed veterans face to face, traveled to research old battlefields, flew in a B-17 and a T-38, accompanied a Special Forces raid in Iraq, and later went to North Korea while researching the Korean War.

His breakout book, A Higher Call, came after years of research into the story of American bomber pilot Charlie Brown and German fighter ace Franz Stigler, whose meeting over Germany in 1943 did not end the way war says it should. The book became a bestseller, but what matters more to many readers is the feeling it leaves behind. The air combat is vivid, yet the heart of it is mercy, memory, and the strange kinship that can survive even between enemies.

Voices of the Pacific, compiled with Marcus Brotherton, took a different path. Instead of building around one central duel or friendship, it gathers firsthand accounts from Marines who fought from Pearl Harbor through some of the Pacific war's hardest campaigns and then tried to come home again. Readers who respond to it often talk about how immediate it feels, as if the veterans are sitting across the table telling the story themselves.

War is the setting, but people are always the point.

That human focus carries into Devotion, his book about Navy aviators Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner during the Korean War. Brown was the Navy's first Black carrier pilot, and Makos treats the friendship at the center of the book with the same care he gives the air combat. The story later reached an even bigger audience when Devotion was adapted for film. In Spearhead, he shifts to armored warfare and follows tank gunner Clarence Smoyer from the Sherman to the Pershing and into the brutal fight for Cologne.

Across his books, the pattern is easy to see. He returns again and again to ordinary young men in extreme situations, to the bonds that form under pressure, and to the questions that stay after a battle ends. Readers often come for the hardware, the missions, or the history, but stay for the decency, grief, loyalty, and hard choices that live inside the record.

Makos now lives in Denver, Colorado. He has said he feels a race against time to record as many veteran stories as he can, especially from generations that are disappearing. That sense of urgency, and gratitude, still seems to guide the work.